Human Evolution Is Over

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Does he?

What exactly is 'male menopause'?

At any rate, nothing in Jone's text quoted in the opening post states that male menopause is proven; is this information from comments/statements Jones has made elsewhere?

menopause would be a deterioration or drop in quality of the reproductive components, usually associated with age. I dunno look it up!

Er, menopause is the pause in menses that brings the fertile stage of a human females life developmental stages to an end. Men (including fertile ones) do not usually shed their uterine wall on a cyclical basis. This is probably correlated to their lack of a uterus. So far as I know, men do not usually start menses in order to be able to pause/stop them.

A deterioration or drop of quality of the reproductive components does not constitute menopause. Pre-menopausal women experience such a deterioration/drop in quality, years before they enter into menopause.

Human evolution over? I dunno, are you willing to change?

Is there any shred of evidence that older fathers are less common than in the past? Actual evidence, not just some guy's opinion? It would seem rather obvious that people marry generally at much older ages than in the past (it used to be you married as soon as you hit puberty, earlier in some places - the equivalent of how wild animals, which evolve, behave) and while much of the rising life expectancy can be attributed to lower infant mortality, some of it is also due to adults living longer (and hence men potentially fathering at older ages). Men are having children at ages which few in the Stone Age would have even expected to reach. Surely most children in the Stone Age were fathered by teenagers, and hardly any past the age of 30 (because very few lived to that age at all)?
It sounds like the guy is making an astonishingly stupid assumption to reach a conclusion for which no evidence is presented either (is there any evidence human evolution is in fact slowing down? I'm not saying it's not, but it would be nice to have some evidence on whether it's happening before trying to explain why it's happening)

If you're caught in the stream, can you tell if it's speeding up or slowing down?

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008 ... culiar.php

^post from another leading evolutionist in response to the article in the OP.

well, it's a good start, but I'm not sure about the "you couldn't count on living to the age of 35" line. While I would guess the average age of reproduction is hardly any lower than it would have been in the past, any individual who did make it to reproductive age had a pretty good chance of surviving quite a bit past 35. It would be more instructive to simply have addressed what the average age of reproduction would have been in the past compared to now.

Well, that's it then?

This is as good as it gets?

We don't end up with huge brains and bulgy foreheads?

Ah well, end of the line, all off ....

I thoroughly disagree with this doctor. As long as there is diversity amonst the species of this planet, adaptation will not hault.

Nope ! ! Sorry ! ! It's all over. "Game over man ! !! !"

You can't know that. Evolution is not just about species; it is also about the individual.

Biological evolution is not about the individual at all.

Microevolution, not macroevolution. Since the day I was born, I have evolved quite a ways as an individual.

What's all this, then? Shows over. All of you go home!
Move along now, shows over. Get a move on, then.

While new mutations may or may not be emerging, this does not mean that there can't be selection on the frequency of existing gene variations.

And indeed, there may be quite substantial selection taking place. For one thing, there is reason to believe (as I never tire of pointing out) we're actually getting stupider, because high IQ individuals are considerably less likely to reproduce than low IQ individuals.